It’s hard to separate Young Adult from the expectations that surround it—both what we’re expecting of the artists, and what they seem to expect of the audience. Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman, Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as an it’s-okay-you’re-supposed-to-hate-her alcoholic narcissist named Mavis, Patrick Wilson as Mavis’s small-town high-school boyfriend who she sets out to seduce, and Patton Oswalt as the former locker-next-door-having nerd whose backstory is oddly specific and dark (permanently crippled in high school by a savage gay-bashing—even though he’s not gay—he walks with a cane and talks with surprising frequency about his bent penis).
All this comes from a writer and director who collectively have some smart, fun work on their résumés, and Young Adult is getting a lot of press for Theron’s hard edges, her uncompromising vanity and bitterness, and for Oswalt’s cripple/nerd with a heart of gold. But while it does have a few inspired moments, they’re just that—two-to-four-minute periods of insight and humor, showing the potential of what all these people could’ve made if they hadn’t taken a few dozen wrong turns. The whole movie is so off-key, so toneless and directionless, that it’s difficult to just sit and experience the thing without interrupting it to ponder, “Ohhh, maybe they sort of meant this?” and “Do you think they wanted me to feel that?”
When Oswalt’s Matt tells Mavis, “Guys like me were born loving women like you,” it doesn’t inspire affection, or sadness, or soft laughter. It just confirms that he has shitty taste in women. We sort of expect him to teach her how to feel something, how to connect with another person or engage with the world in some authentic way, but that never happens. Mavis, the “big city” woman (she lives now in Minneapolis, the “Mini Apple”), is damaged and shallow. Perhaps we could sympathize with the small-towners who are confronted with her awfulness? But they don’t give us anything to latch on to.
Obviously, movies can be worth watching without people we love, lessons we learn, etc. But here there’s just a void where the substance should be. They spent millions of dollars and just forgot to say—well, pretty much anything. 
“They spent millions of dollars and just forgot to say—well, pretty much anything.”
If you forget about the money, this sounds more or less like The Stranger.
This was godawful. “Off-key” is definitely a good way to describe it.